The Successor Read online

  “My God,” she whispered. “That’s incredible.”

  “It’ll be in your account this afternoon, and you better send half of it to the IRS right away. They’ll get cranky if you don’t, especially when it’s this much.”

  “Chris, I don’t know what to say. I mean, thank you, of course.”

  “It’s the same thing I’m giving Blair and Tom.” Blair Johnson and Tom O’Brien were two of the other managing partners who reported directly to Gillette. “Quentin, too. I’d say that you guys deserve it, but I’m not sure anyone really deserves forty million dollars. At least not for what we do. Kids who get shot up for their country maybe, but not us.”

  Allison tilted her head to one side. “You seem awfully patriotic lately.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been making lots of comments about the military and Iraq and kids getting killed in the line of duty.”

  Christian shrugged. “Yeah, well, maybe I feel guilty.”

  “Why would you feel guilty?”

  He thought about the question for a moment. “I’ve made a lot of money thanks to the fact that kids are willing to lay down their lives to protect my ability to do it. I’ve never done anything like that in my life.” He hesitated. “Maybe I should have.”

  “You’ve paid a lot of taxes.”

  Taxes. Somehow that didn’t make him feel any better. Which was one big reason he was so intrigued by Cuba: It would be a chance for him to give something back. “That’s not quite the same as risking your life.”

  “Agreed, but you can’t feel bad because you didn’t volunteer to invade Iraq, Chris.”

  “I know.” But he was thinking that helping Wood with Cuba was perfect. That it might satisfy his hunger to make a difference. To really make a difference.

  “What about Jim?” asked Allison. Jim Marshall was the fifth managing partner. “What are you giving him?”

  “Nothing,” Christian replied bluntly.

  “Wow.” Allison winced. “That’s kind of harsh, don’t you think?”

  “The portfolio companies he’s responsible for are sucking wind, Ally. You know that. Last year, four of his six companies did worse than they did the year before. The other two lost money. I can’t give him money from the Laurel profits with that kind of track record. Besides, he’s making a million a year in salary.” Christian tapped the desk. “Most important, he’s got to clean up his act.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got a drinking problem.”

  She looked up, amazed. “How do you know that?”

  “I smelled something on his breath one day a few months ago, so I had Quentin put one of his guys on him. Tail Jim when he went out, you know? Turns out he’s drinking at lunch almost every day. Three or four Scotches with some accountant friend of his, a female friend. Quentin’s guy told me they’ve been holding hands, making out like teenagers in Central Park. The guy’s married with kids, for crying out loud. Look, I’m not naïve, I know this stuff happens all the time, but he’s not some low-level clerk who pushes paper for a living, either. He’s the chairman of six companies. He can’t be doing that kind of crap.” Christian saw that Allison was going to say something. “And, I found a bottle of Scotch in his desk,” he spoke up before she could. “He’s drinking here at Everest. That’s ridiculous.”

  “You went through his desk?”

  “I sure did.”

  “Have you ever gone through my desk?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You haven’t given me any reason to.”

  “But you would if I did?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Allison gritted her teeth. “I think people are entitled to their privacy, Chris. No matter what. For me, a person’s desk comes under the privacy heading.”

  Christian shook his head firmly. “Not when they’re handling billions of dollars of other people’s money. Check out the contract you signed when you joined Everest. It says I can do whatever I think is necessary to protect the integrity and the reputation of Everest Capital. If you’re going to run this place someday, you better get that same attitude fast because ultimately the investors will blame you if things go wrong around here. They won’t want to hear that somebody else is responsible, even if they are. They blame the chairman. That’s why I get the big bucks.” He saw that his comment about her running the place someday had taken her by surprise. They hadn’t talked about that possibility in a couple of years, and she probably figured he’d decided not to name her vice chairman. “Fortunately everyone else’s portfolio companies are doing all right. Making four and a half billion dollars off the Laurel deal tends to keep our investors happy, too, even when we keep nine hundred million dollars of it. But it wouldn’t be fair to everyone else if I gave Jim a big chunk of the ups when he doesn’t deserve it.”

  “But nothing?” she protested. “I mean, he’s got older kids. One in college, I think.”

  “If you can’t get by on a million bucks a year, something’s wrong.”

  She took a deep breath. “He just got divorced, Chris,” she said in a low voice.

  Christian looked up. “Oh?”

  “That’s what’s going on. That’s why he’s drinking and meeting another woman. It wasn’t like he was running around with her before the divorce, either.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “The divorce was finalized at the end of last year, and he really got screwed. He’s paying his ex something like fifty grand a month for life with no tax deduction for the alimony.”

  Christian ran a few numbers in his head. Fifty grand a month would be six hundred thousand a year. If Jim wasn’t able to deduct those payments, he was being taxed on his gross earnings, on the whole million dollars. Federal taxes alone on that amount would be almost four hundred grand. As incredible as it seemed, Jim Marshall was losing money every month.

  “Did you give him a bonus last February?” Allison asked.

  “No.”

  “So he’s actually losing money every month.”

  “I know, I just did the calculation.”

  “The problem,” Allison explained, “is that the court looked at his income as a whole, with his bonuses. What he’s averaged over the last few years. Apparently his lawyer convinced the judge not to consider the ups payments, like Laurel, in terms of calculating the monthly alimony because they weren’t predictable. But he still has to give her half of those whenever they’re paid to him.”

  “How do you know so much about his divorce?” Christian wanted to know.

  “I asked him. How do you not know?” Allison waved her hand. “That’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

  Maybe this was why Victoria Graham wanted Allison to be vice chairman of Everest Capital, Christian thought to himself. Maybe Allison was more in touch with the staff. Maybe Graham had gotten sentimental as she got older. Hell, he was getting more patriotic. And it wasn’t that he didn’t care about the people here, he just couldn’t seem to find the time to dig that deeply into their lives. He wasn’t sure they really wanted him to, either. A year ago he’d hired a human resources expert to help him figure out why Everest was experiencing what he thought was a high employee-turnover rate. Maybe that was the wrong approach. Maybe there was a simpler solution. Understand people’s personal lives.

  Christian shut his eyes tightly and rubbed his forehead. Don’t be distracted, he thought to himself. His job was to make money for his investors. Ultimately, while some of them might be sympathetic to Jim Marshall’s plight—because statistically at least half of them would have gone through divorce themselves—they invested with Everest to make money, not to solve personal crises. As far as Christian was concerned, paying $40 million to someone who was having a liquid lunch every day and shirking his responsibilities set a bad precedent. No matter what his personal situation was.

  “How did your meeting with Victoria Graham go yesterday?” he asked.

  “Fine, but don’t cha
nge the subject. I’m worried about Jim. Don’t leave him out in the cold on Laurel, Chris. He’s counting on this money.”

  Christian shook his head regretfully. “I’m not giving him any of the Laurel ups, Ally. It wouldn’t look good.”

  “Throw him a few million dollars,” she countered, “to help him get back on his feet.”

  “No. But what I will do is send him to AA, and I’ll give him paid leave. Enough on top of his regular salary that he’ll be able to pay his bills.” Christian didn’t like that Allison had gotten close enough to Jim Marshall to know the details of his divorce. Getting to that level implied that Jim and Allison had become more than just coworkers. The receptionists seemed to find Marshall attractive—Christian had overheard them talking once. Maybe Allison did, too. “How much time have you been spending with Jim anyway?”

  “Enough. You haven’t been around to spend any time with.”

  There it was again, that aggravated tone she’d used when she first sat down. “What’s wrong, Ally?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, we’ve known each other too long for this kind of stuff. Don’t hold back on me.” Christian caught the glare in her eyes.

  “Isn’t that the damn point?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been holding back on me lately. I thought we were closer than that.”

  “How have I been holding back on you?”

  “When my associate knows that you’re going to make the Laurel distributions before I do, I call that holding back. And it isn’t just things like that, Chris,” she said loudly, standing up. “It’s the fact that we hardly ever talk to each other anymore.”

  “We talk all the time,” he protested.

  “About business.”

  “That’s what we’re in together,” he said, gesturing around the office. “Business.”

  Allison gazed down at him. “Silly me. I thought it was so much more.” She turned and stalked toward the office door.

  “Ally,” he barked, standing up, too. “Ally, stop!”

  But she didn’t, slamming the door loudly behind her.

  FOR A BASE CAMP, it wasn’t much. Just a few run-down, rotting wooden shacks with corroding tin roofs at the edge of an overgrown, brackish canal in the middle of the sultry Florida Everglades. Glittering downtown Miami with its chic nightclubs and beautiful women was less than seventy-five miles away—he’d enjoyed one of those clubs and two women he’d met in the club last night. But you’d never know how close all that was by looking at these dilapidated ruins. Rumor was this place had served as a training and staging area for the Bay of Pigs invaders back in the early 1960s. Men who had died at the hands of the Cuban revolutionary forces when the U.S. air cover they’d been counting on hadn’t materialized.

  Antonio Barrado glanced around the desolate place with his one good eye—he’d lost the other in a knife fight years ago and now he wore a glass eye and hid that the pupil didn’t move behind polarized sunglasses. For a base camp, it would have been almost useless. Looking around, he concluded that if the entire effort had relied on camps like this, the invasion would have failed even if the air cover had shown up. But, for what he needed, it was perfect.

  Barrado looped the bowline of the small outboard motorboat around what he judged was the sturdiest of the rotting pilings and pulled himself up onto the pier’s brittle planks. He was a small man—just 145 pounds—so, as long as he was careful, he could move along the old boards without worrying too much about falling through. He glanced to the right, toward deeper water, toward where the planks ended but the pilings continued out into the murky water like soldiers in a column two across. Hurricanes had destroyed the pier in the deeper water, as the storms had also destroyed most of the shack roofs. No worries, they could repair the place quickly. A few hours of work and it would be fine for the short time they’d need it. The only other thing they had to do was find a place for the clearing.

  Barrado’s good eye narrowed as he noticed a subtle movement on the surface of the water near the far bank. Two round bumps emerged slowly from the depths, followed by a third that was slightly larger—the size of a doorknob—and about a foot in front of the other two. Alligator eyes—and its nose. Seventy-five miles from Miami, from a bustling civilization where man was supreme, but here the animals still ruled. He tapped the .44-caliber magnum pistol hanging from his belt, making certain it was there. It was the great equalizer. A piece of equipment that made him just as deadly as a ten-foot alligator—or a man twice his size.

  He stared back fiercely across the canal at the alligator for a few moments through the bright sunshine. A natural instinct to try to communicate to the predator that he wasn’t scared and that it better keep its distance. Finally it slipped back into the depths, leaving several faint swirls on the surface that slowly evaporated until everything became calm again. The fine hairs on the back of his neck rose as the last eddy died away. He was accustomed to being the hunter, not the hunted.

  It smelled awful out here, like rotting eggs. The only thing about the Everglades Barrado couldn’t stand. He could take everything else: the intense heat and humidity, the isolation, the predators, the two-o’clock thunderstorms you could set your watch by. He just hated the stench. And it wasn’t bad while you were cruising along in a motorboat with the wind whipping past your nostrils. Only when you stopped and stayed in one place for a while did you notice it. He pulled the bandanna up from around his neck and put it over the tip of his nose. He’d dipped it in lemon water this morning before taking off in the boat from the put-in on Interstate 75—what they called Alligator Alley down here.

  As Barrado stepped into the first shack and pushed aside the vines that had overtaken the insides, something slithered beneath his boot. He stepped back quickly and whipped out the huge revolver, then pushed aside the brush. The cottonmouth had already coiled up to strike, tongue flicking in and out quickly as it dared him to come any farther. He hated snakes, especially poisonous ones.

  He aimed and fired, and the report thundered through the tiny enclosure. One less snake in the world. That was a good thing.

  ALLISON SAT on a bench in Central Park, staring out over the reflecting pond in front of her. She’d come here straight from Christian’s office because she didn’t know what else to do. She had to get out, had to get away. It had been as if the walls of Everest were closing in on her. For the first time in her life she felt trapped.

  She wanted it to be fun and easy with Christian. Wanted to talk to him about things like what his favorite movie was. Then, after giving him a hard time for his answer—no matter what it was—take him to dinner. She wanted it to be the way it had been—the way she’d hoped it could be all along. But apparently it wasn’t going to happen—because Christian wasn’t going to let it happen.

  She leaned forward and put her face in her hands. Maybe she ought to listen to Victoria Graham after all. As shocked as she’d been by what the older woman had laid out for her yesterday, maybe that was the only alternative left.

  10

  VICTORIA GRAHAM watched the thick, twelve-foot-long, brown, gold, and yellow Burmese python approach, sizing up its prey through the underbrush, barely moving a leaf as its wide head slid forward menacingly. When the huge snake hesitated, collecting itself into several tight S-shapes, she felt a rush of exhilaration surge through her body. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Her eyes flashed to the white rat. It was hunched down behind a small bush in a corner of the twenty-by-twenty-foot glass enclosure—which she’d had constructed in one of three climate-controlled barns on her hundred-acre Connecticut property. The rat’s pink eyes flicked left and right, searching desperately for the danger it knew was somewhere out there, trying to convince itself it was hidden from the python’s view. With no conception that the snake sensed its presence by the heat it emitted, not by the way the rat saw the world.

  There was no way for the rat to hide—and now that it had gone to a corner, nowhere for it
to run, either. It rose up cautiously on its hind legs to get a better view, drawing its front feet together, as though it were praying. Which was the right thing to do, Graham thought. Because only God could save it now.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the man who’d come to visit. He was standing twenty feet away, his back to the barn’s cinder-block wall, looking around anxiously at all the cages. The same way Allison Wallace had looked around nervously in the office. Graham motioned for him to get down on his knees and crawl to where she was, silently warning him with a finger to her mouth to move slowly so as not to disturb the life-and-death struggle playing out before them. She was vaguely amused by the aggravated expression he gave her. Obviously he hadn’t come all the way from Washington for a display of reptile predation and wanted her to understand that. But she didn’t care. In fact, she was a little put off by his showing his aggravation at all—he’d asked for the meeting. Of course his attitude was all wrapped up in his mind-set. He wasn’t used to being treated as an afterthought. He was used to being the center of attention. At least, one step away from the man who was.

  He wasn’t dressed for a safari, either, which was probably bothering him, too. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but he had on a suit and tie. The barn’s floor was covered with dried mud and straw, and the elbows and knees of his suit were quickly getting filthy as he crawled along. Even the end of his red silk tie was picking up dirt. She grinned as the pun crossed her mind: All this was bringing him back to the earth, so to speak.

  Finally he was kneeling beside her so that both of their faces were just inches from the glass, from where the rat was trying to hide.

  “You’re going to like this,” she whispered, admiring the perfectly shaped diamond patterns along the snake’s sturdy body. Speaking loudly wouldn’t bother the snake—it sensed vibrations from the ground, not from sound—but a loud voice might spook the rat, somehow enabling it to escape by startling the big snake. Even though the python was hungry, it might be another hour before it was ready to strike again because it was a careful and precise hunter. One reason she admired these snakes so much: Nothing happened until they were ready for it to happen, until the kill was all but assured and they were certain the angle of attack was perfect. So there was little chance that they’d be injured in the ensuing struggle. They almost never missed when they struck. “It’s incredible to watch, Grant.”